What's the Frequency Marlin?
Marlin Mickle is at the Epicenter of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology Development.
By: Tim Hayes
It’s a long way from Windber to Wal-Mart, but that’s the road Marlin Mickle has traveled as a nationally recognized innovator in the field of radio frequency identification, or RFID – a technology that promises to change the face of medicine, retailing and virtually every other aspect of American life in the years to come.
Mickle, a fixture on the University of Pittsburgh campus for more than 40 years, certainly can claim RFID as an area where he has led breakthrough research and enabled practical applications in industry. More on those specifics later. But this “gray Panther” has made his mark across a spectrum of technologies and initiatives – while never losing the innate curiosity of a self-described “tinkerer” or the warmth and shared wisdom of a professor who genuinely cares for his students.
“Marlin’s a faculty member in several different departments – Computer Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Telecommunications and Electrical Engineering – plus his additional role at Pitt as the Executive Director of the Swanson Center for Product Innovation,” said Mike Lovell, Dean of the College of Engineering at Pitt. “He gets involved in issues like intellectual property and entrepreneurship – how you can access it,” Lovell explained. “The relationships between the university and industry, the role the university plays. It’s a very important function. The biggest thing about Marlin, though, is that he is extremely productive yet is always willing to give of his time. I consider myself to work as hard as anybody at this university, but he at least matches me, if not more.”
“He’s brilliant, there’s no other way to describe it,” Lovell continued. “In academics, everybody has different skills and strengths. Marlin is very good at thinking on his feet. I enjoy working with him on challenging problems because he’s very resourceful. It’s fun to work with him.”
Oh, and there’s one more thing that helps to make Mickle a breed apart. “A lot of people in the university environment think they’re better than anyone else,” said Lovell. “Marlin’s down to earth. He lets his accomplishments speak for themselves. He’s had some very successful companies over the years, but he likes it here, and he could very easily leave for a seven-figure salary somewhere else. “Just look at his impact on students, from being a faculty member. The most important thing is student impact. That is really what matters in what we do. His students love him, in addition to everything else he’s done.” That sentiment was echoed by Steve Hackworth, a graduate student who worked with Mickle on an RFID project called “Blink Right” that has stirred excitement at the national level for its promise to help Bell’s Palsy patients deal with a troubling symptom of partial facial paralysis – the inability to blink on command and lubricate the eye. In the Blink Right project, conducted under Mickle’s direction at the Swanson Center, a tiny silicon chip in the lid of the unaffected eye, another chip with a receiver in the lid of the damaged eye, and two other chips embedded in the frame of a pair of eyeglasses, all communicate with each other so that when the good eye blinks, a signal tells the bad eye to do the same.
“I always thought of Dr. Mickle like a grandpa who’s been around a long time and just does his thing,” said Hackworth. “He likes being in the field of engineering, just doing the stuff. Things can get all messed up with faculty and intellectual property, but he has a way of getting in there, getting his hands dirty, and making it all work. In the lab, he loves working with students and loves learning from them.
“I remember a class he taught on computer networks and wireless protocols, and I remember it because it was so different than a lot of classes I’ve taken – there was no textbook in this course,” recalled Hackworth. “He’d have stories and information on the latest applications. The course content would change from semester to semester as the technology changed. He teaches the protocols as they develop.
“Dr. Mickle would hold your attention for the whole class – he wasn’t just presenting dry material,” he said. “You had to make your own textbook from your notes, along with homework. He would pose a problem or situation, and you had to state what you knew about it, and describe how you would address it.
“Outside the classroom, he was always willing to talk about what’s going on. I mean, he knows something about everything. You can tell he really enjoys teaching. And he’s very business-minded, since he deals with so many businesses. And when a student really makes something work well, he makes sure the student gets the credit – I really respect that about him.
“If you stand apart from Dr. Mickle and look at all he’s done and all he knows, it could be intimidating,” Hackworth admitted. “But he’s very accommodating and never condescending. He’s a very humble person who doesn’t come off as this all-knowing expert.”
Yet “expert” is a moniker Mickle undoubtedly has earned. He holds a patent on shrinking and flattening an antenna into a small, flat device that can go on a silicone chip one-tenth of an inch square – a key component in the future of RFID applications. His work on “energy harvesting,” or drawing energy right out of the air, also leads the nation.
So, with all of the accolades and admiration that continue to come his way, the question remains – How did a kid from sleepy, quiet, little Windber, PA, end up at the top of the RFID mountain? Answer: Be a chip off the old block. No pun intended.
“I’ve done a lot of tinkering since I was a kid,” Mickle said. “My father was a carpenter, and he could do anything electronically and mechanically. Back then, when something broke you had to know how to fix it, and my father was better at that than most people. He and my mother gave me presents for Christmas, and I’d mess with them trying to figure out how they worked. I’ve been playing with stuff in that way since I was a kid.”
In recognition and appreciation of the freedom to tinker that his parents encouraged in Mickle, in 2004 he donated $3 million to create the Ruth E. Mickle and Howard T. Mickle Chairs within the Department of Electrical Engineering – one of the largest gifts a Pitt faculty member has ever made to the university.
Mickle graduated at the top of his undergraduate class on the GI Bill, but couldn’t afford graduate school. The university, recognizing this diamond in the rough, created a full- time job for him so that he could work and attend school. He joined the faculty in 1962 and never looked back.
“Over all that time, there’s not much change with the quality of talent that comes through the university,” said Mickle. “It’s always been high. The difference in recent years has instead been the big RFID hype coming from Wal-Mart.”
In 2003, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company, issued the decree that 100 of its top suppliers be RFID-ready by January 2005, with another 200 suppliers on board with RFID by January 2006. Wal-Mart says using RFID tags on shipments to its stores and, in time, on each item sold, will protect against counterfeiting, improve inventory and supply chain management, and boost profits.
“The Wal-Mart policy is making RFID popular, but it has been around for years,” Mickle explained. “Much work needs to be done, though. Everybody knows the shortcomings. They can be overcome if people deal with it. Wal-Mart felt it is in a position to cause people to take a look and solve the hard problems. We try to focus on these hard issues at the Swanson Center. Not a lot of people are.
“RFID does nothing that can’t be done with bar codes in a retail setting if the checkout person is fast and agile enough to get the bar code where it needs to be,” he said. “RFID does it automatically because it can see through things and can read the tags from different angles. But we’re trying to make RFID perform better.” That drive to perfect the technology has been a constant climb for Mickle and his minions for quite some time.
“Commercial applications of RFID tags that have been studied show that they could be read accurately 80 percent of the time,” he said. “Large pharmaceutical companies say it’s 60 percent of the time. The truth is, nobody’s going to buy this until it’s at least 99 percent accurate. We’re asking for something to defy the laws of physics, cost less than a nickel, and have it work all the time flawlessly – because that’s what the market demands.
“There is not as much demand for medical applications as retail at this point, but the mark-up for medical RFID is much higher,” said Mickle. “Take a deep brain stimulation function using RFID. It uses the same phenomenon as a retail application, but could carry a single unit price of $20,000. Considerably more than a nickel.” The promise of RFID, Mickle said, still comes back to being able to look through things. The bugaboo in medical applications remains the body itself, which acts as a conductor, meaning you can’t see through it very far or easily.
“Pantene [shampoo] is the standard story to explain this problem with RFID,” Mickle said. “Procter & Gamble wanted to use RFID to track shipments and sales of Pantene but you couldn’t get the signal to see through the bottles and the shampoo. It won’t work in the context of RFID as it now is understood. Also hampering the technology is the fact that every tag has to be programmed uniquely to get the specialization needed. Picture a shopping cart full of items with RFID tags. I’m sure some clever person can fool the RFID receiver and get something for nothing, and it will be all over the Internet once they figure it out. RFID isn’t foolproof yet.”
New RFID techniques in development include the deep brain stimulation referenced earlier, in which the brain can send wireless commands to parts of the body to stimulate muscles that increase blood flow to improve healing and comfort to those suffering from chronic disease and pain. The level of energy needed to accomplish this task is the same as is needed to power a cell phone for about 10 seconds, he said.
To those who worry about all of this electrical wave activity surrounding and penetrating us, Mickle’s advice is just to relax. “I’m going to say the opposite – that increased brain stimulation likely helps you in the long run,” he noted.
And the long-run remains his focus. Under his direction, the Swanson Center provides a portal to Pitt for area industry. With seven full-time faculty, roughly 10 graduate students and as many as 24 undergraduates working on problems and solutions, the Swanson Center has emerged as a jewel of innovation and growth – with RFID in the lead.
“If you look back to the origin of Marlin’s RFID technology, he ignored what people traditionally thought,” said Lovell. “He just went ahead and did it. Taking energy out of the air, producing demonstrations to prove it could be done. He wasn’t afraid to try.
“You look at the recognized top RFID centers in the world, and you see Cambridge, MIT and Pitt,” Lovell added. “In terms of bringing notoriety to the region, being in the top three is pretty good. There’s not much where we’re at the very top of the world. Robotics, organ transplantation and RFID are Pittsburgh’s top three areas. “He’s important because of that,” said Lovell. “People who work with him recognize that. Marlin’s at the epicenter of RFID.”
Yet, for all of the advances made in this country in technological applications over the course of his career, Mickle expressed concern for the long-term future of the United States’ ability to compete and excel.
“This is a very critical time for the U.S.,” he said. “We will graduate 60,000 engineers this year across the country, but China will graduate 500,000 engineers. You might say that not all of those will be quality engineers, but if only half are of some quality, that’s cause for concern. Every member of the Politburo in China is an engineer. I would challenge you to find one engineer in the U.S. Congress. Right now we can still compete, but not in the long run if this trend continues.
“I have a friend in Singapore, and I see that we can’t compete with their system because they have their own funding for applications and we have to go through established systems, each with their own rules and gatekeepers,” he continued. “Singapore is ruled by a benevolent dictator, but one that’s sold on technology and the value of engineering – same as the Chinese Politburo. We have some serious work to do from kindergarten through the Ph.D. level in this country. Somebody has to bring up again the importance of technical expertise, and changing the impression of engineering.” At the local level, his view is a bit more sunny, however.
“I think we have potential as a region,” Mickle said. “Pitt is contemplating establishing an RFID Center of Excellence. We’re doing information gathering now on what other universities are doing regarding RFID. Our differentiator is that we’re concerned with the ‘last mile,’ meaning that it’s easy to run cable down the street, but hard to connect it to the house. We worry about the final connection of RFID to various uses. Because that is what the market worries about.”
From Windber to Wal-Mart, and with stops along the way across the country and in overseas assignments, Mickle has both ridden and steered the waves of change – electronic and otherwise. What’s been his secret to success?
“You have to void yourself of prejudices, pre-conceived ideas or whether you’ve seen this type of person before when it’s time to get to work on something,” he said. “Because if you don’t, your mind starts to focus on that and you don’t get to what matters most. Nothing is useless to the man of sense – everything is taken into account.”
